The Staves Quotes & Sayings

The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees - BLOOD. — Charles Dickens

Unkar Delta at Mile 73
The layers of brick red sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone of the Dox formation deposited a billion years ago, erode easily, giving the landscape an open, rolling character very different that the narrow, limestone walled canyon upstream, both in lithology and color, fully fitting Van Dyke's description of "raspberry-red color, tempered with a what-not of mauve, heliotrope, and violet." Sediments flowing in from the west formed deltas, floodplains, and tidal flats, which indurated into these fine-grained sedimentary rocks thinly laid deposits of a restful sea, lined with shadows as precise as the staves of a musical score, ribboned layers, an elegant alteration of quiet siltings and delicious lappings, crinkled water compressed, solidified, lithified. — Ann Zwinger

She chased the song like a hound fast upon a scent. She pursued it through a forest primeval: a dark land planted with musical staves and rests and grown thick with briars of annotation. On she went and on still until she caught sight of the song ahead of her, fleeting and sly. "I see it," she said aloud, though she didn't mean to. — A.S. Peterson

Everyone desires relationships and community. Most people want to belong to a cohesive, like-minded group. It staves off loneliness. It promotes identity. These are natural and very human instincts. — Joshua Ferris

We cannot eat or drink or wear more than the day's supply of food and raiment; the surplus gives us the care of storing it, and the anxiety of watching against a thief. One staff aids a traveller, but a bundle of staves is a heavy burden. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand
a center of gravity. — Adrienne Rich

I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind. — George Eliot

And the crocuses nodded and laughed, holding up their little yellow staves gaily to the sunshine, and shouting to each other that it was spring, clamouring to make the most of their great day, before the flowers came in battalions to crowd them out of sight and mind. — Gertrude Page

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, 45
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations. 50
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. — T. S. Eliot

Sufficient for the day is all that we can enjoy. We cannot eat or drink or wear more than the day's supply of food and raiment; the surplus gives us the care of storing it, and the anxiety of watching against a thief. One staff aids a traveller, but a bundle of staves is a heavy burden. Enough is not only as good as a feast, but is all that the greatest glutton can truly enjoy. This is all that we should expect; a craving for more than this is ungrateful. When our Father does not give us more, we should be content with his daily allowance. — Charles Spurgeon

Bringing up the rear, the place of greatest danger, comes Tiger Lily, proudly erect, a princess in her own right. She is the most beautiful of dusky Dianas and the belle of the Piccaninnies, coquettish, cold, and amorous by turns; there is not a brave who would not have the wayward thing to wife, but she staves off the altar with a hatchet. — J.M. Barrie

I am his tomb. The earth is nothing. Dead. Staves and orchards issue from my mouth. His. Perfume my chest, which is wide, wide open. A greengage plum swells his silence. The bees escape from his eyes, from his sockets where the liquid pupils have flowed from under the flaccid eyelids. To eat a youngster shot on the barricades, to devour a young hero, is no easy thing. We all love the sun. My mouth is bloody. So are my fingers. I tore the flesh to shreds with my teeth. Corpses do not usually bleed. His did. — Jean Genet

History pays no heed to the unspectacular citizen who worked hard all day and walked at night to a humble home with dust on his tunic and his flat cap. But in the end the builders have had the better of it. The miracles they accomplished in stone are still standing and still beautiful, even with the disintegration of so many centuries on them, but the battlefields where great warriors died are so encroached upon by modern villas and so befouled by the rotting remains of motorcars and the staves of oil barrels that they do not always repay a visit. — Thomas B. Costain

In my fancy, you perch in the Cooperage & I smell the Peel of the Wood, & the Staves are around you & the white Hogsheads newly bound & the Shavings curled and looped upon the Floor, silver and gold--& you are eating a fat Mushroom. — M T Anderson

The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 + 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics. — Antonin Artaud

When a man is to travel into a far country ... one staff in his hand may comfortably support him, but a bundle of staves would be troublesome. Thus a competency of these outward things may happily help us in the way to heaven, whereas abundance may be hurtful. — Richard Sibbes

In my desperation to try to lull myself into a gentle sloom, I have created a list of things that will often assist my descent into delicious treacle-sleep. The list includes a series of things I can do if I go to bed and wake up early, and includes things like playing games and reading books, but one item that continually seems to work is telling myself:

The faster I go to sleep, the faster I can have cookies for breakfast.

This idea might seem rudimentary, but it staves off the sulks long enough that I can find a few hours of sleep, even on the hottest of days. If only Biscuit Power worked for other insomniacs, cookies might save humanity from itself. — Michelle Franklin

Milena found Cilia outside, holding her bamboo box. Milena hugged her. 'I'm sorry about your shins,' she said. Milena lifted the lid of the box, and saw it, the precious paper, ruled in staves. People were generous. Milena had never believed that. — Geoff Ryman

The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it. — David Hume

Fight, gentlemen of England! fight, bold yeomen!
Draw, archers, draw your arrows to the head!
Spur your proud horses hard, and ride in blood;
Amaze the welkin with your broken staves! — William Shakespeare

Hence a ship is said to be tight, when her planks are so compact and solid as to prevent the entrance of the water in which she is immersed: and a cask is called tight, when the staves are so close that none of the liquid contained therein can issue through or between them. — William Falconer

Antipater uses us favourably if he looks upon us as staves, but very hardly if he considers us as freemen. — Xenocrates

Much can they praise the trees so straight and high, The sailing pine,the cedar proud and tall, The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry, The builder oak, sole king of forests all, The aspin good for staves, the cypress funeral, The laurel, meed of mighty conquerors And poets sage, the fir that weepest still, The yew obedient to the bender's will, The birch for shafts, the sallow for the mill, The myrrh sweet-bleeding in the bitter wound, The warlike beech, the ash for nothing ill, The fruitful olive, and the platane round, The carver holm, the maple seldom inward sound. — Edmund Spenser

It's also why we've recently seen an avalanche of new studies, books, and video games built on the myelin-centric principle that practice staves off cognitive decline. — Daniel Coyle

And then, once you've written, you meet producers and directors and actors. You get to meet interesting, talented, creative, artistic people, and it also staves off a bit of creative stagnation when you can't act, which is the reality of the industry. So often, you can't act because there are just too many cars and not enough car parks. But, I love writing and I'll never stop doing that. — Josh Lawson

Is Obama satanic?" he asked me. I was grateful for the conversation starter - I consider anything that staves off social awkwardness to be a blessing - but I couldn't lie. — Jon Ronson